alternatehistory.com

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[FONT=&quot] Hat tip to Blitzkrieg Legend, by Karl-Heinz Frieser. [/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]I knew that the Germans weren’t prepared for a long war at the start of World War II, but if Frieser is right, going to war in September 1939 was incredibly foolish. According to Frieser, at the beginning of October 1939 the German army had stockpiles of ammunition for 14 days of combat for one-third of their divisions. They had reserve stocks for another 14 days. The airforce had bombs for 14 days combat, after which they would have run out. [/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]I had read a few other places that the Germans almost ran out of bombs in taking down Poland, and that ammunition was in short supply, but this is the first time I’ve seen those shortages quantified.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]Hitler and company were working on a shoestring as they rearmed. They had a little over five years to build up German military industry, train an army and airforce, build up a force of tanks, planes and artillery, and build a navy. They had to do that in the face of chronic foreign exchange shortages because the German Mark was overvalued and Germany started the rearmament process with low reserves of foreign exchange because of the depression and because of reparations for World War I that the Germans paid until the early 1930s.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]Germany wasn’t self-sufficient in food or most raw materials other than coal and to some extent iron, though some of that had to be imported too. As rearmament heated up, they ran into labor shortages. There was a reason Hitler wanted ‘living room’. Germany was dependent on the rest of the world for raw materials, and couldn’t be an independent power long term without them. [/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]As Germany rearmed, the Nazi leadership shifted priorities in a chaotic and often irrational way that at one point assigned more steel than German’s total production to the navy. In that environment, low visibility items like ammunition and spare parts didn’t take the priority they should have, and it isn’t surprising that ammunition was in short supply.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]By the way, the Germans reacted to the ammo shortage by giving ammunition production top priority in the roughly seven and a half months between the fall of Poland and the start of the German offensive in the west. As a result they had ample stocks of ammunition for the campaign against France.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]Assuming for the moment that Frieser is right about the numbers, let’s see if we can plausibly spin this out into the Germans running out of ammo before the Poles ran out of country, or the Germans suffering some other kind of humiliation that ended World War II abruptly.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]Full-scale fighting in Poland lasted probably about twenty days, with large-scale mopping up going on another ten, and lesser scale fighting for another three or four days. To take the airforce to ineffectiveness we need to stretch that out another two weeks. To get the German army to sputter to a stop, would take somewhere between two and four weeks. [/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]That overstates the case a bit because there would be some ongoing production, and presumably the Germans would ration ammo and go on the defensive before they completely ran out. (more coming soon)[/FONT]
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